State board approves plan to boost MEAP standards

LANSING -- Michigan students are going have to score higher on state tests to be considered passing, a move members said will better prepare students for college – but an advocate called “baby steps” as the state tells parents “the truth” about academic performance.

State Board of Education members today voted 7-1 to increase the “cut scores” – the percentage of questions students must answer correctly to be deemed proficient on Michigan Educational Assessment Program and Michigan Merit Exam tests.

Leaders said the move would better compare the achievement of Michigan students to those in other states and continue a drive to score higher and compete on a worldwide stage.

“This was the right thing to do, and an important thing to do,” board President John Austin said after the vote. “We want the whole world's children to succeed, but we want children in Michigan and all of the United States to have all the advantages to succeed with them.”

State board member Marianne Yared McGuire, a Detroit Democrat, objected, saying the process was moving too quickly, and she wanted to hear from educators in the field.

“These scores have been a moving target for schools and districts, and this move poses a real hardship for struggling schools,” she said.

Board member Kathleen Straus, also a Detroit Democrat, worried parents would find a likely “sharp drop in scores” to “be disturbing.”

But member Nancy Danhof, a Republican who served on the East Lansing Board of Education, said it's up to districts to tell parents why the change was necessary.

Danhof said when past MEAP changes caused scores to dip, “we accepted our responsibility at the local level to do the marketing in our communities so people would understand. Not everybody heard, and there was some backlash. But we understood our responsibility.”

Detroit Republican Richard Zeile said districts need to remind parents that “a score on a test is not a value judgment on your life. We have to make it clear that standards have changed and why. We're moving from more of a general education to a college prep standard.”

Amber Arellano, executive director of the Midwest office of the Education Trust, told board members their moves are welcome “baby steps,” but are needed to balance years of “misinformation” about how state students were performing.

Arellano said while 84 percent of Michigan fourth-graders meet state MEAP reading standards, only 30 percent are proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress example, a federally sponsored test offered to a sampling of students.

“We have to tell citizens the truth about how we're doing,” she said.

Arellano said the state board also has to address how it will hold schools more accountable to meet the standards, and how the state will oversee the hundreds off millions of federal dollars flowing into failing schools for reform projects, making sure the schools “don't just tweak the system that has been failing our students for so many years.”

The vote calls approves a process by which the state Education Department will draft new cut scores, with the new levels to come back for approval between April and June, likely going into effect during the 2011-2012 school year.